Since self-publishing the blog book, writing in general for me has been a different kind of beast. Not sure if it’s better or worse, per say, but I do know that I think about the actual writing in ways I didn’t before the project started. For the first 20 months of blogging, the entries only existed in and of themselves, as snapshots of a particular moment, which could just float away once off the main screen.
Now, though, those words have weight. They have shape and form and tangibility. They sit on coffee tables, they are parcels currently in the US Postal Service, they are in a stack at my feet. Not sure they are any more important, per say, but there they are, nonetheless.
“Lithium Sunset”, the last part of the book, has in particular given me enough food for thought that I’m contemplating joining a mental gym to slough off the excess weight. It details the chronology of my life between the end of my relationship with Jenny to the end of my parents’ relationship just after Christmas. So, you know, it’s chock full of the happy.
Around the time I finally ended it with Jenny, I finally discovered Coldplay’s “A Rush of Blood to the Head”. Don’t believe me? Check it out. I had owned the CD for a few weeks prior to listening to it, because, you know, I was in that whole “do I really want to end the longest relationship of my life and how can I do this and I don’t quite remember what life was like single and man, maybe I’m better off just waiting and seeing what happens” thing. As ya do.
So, given the month-long literary recapitulation that led to the last half of the book, and as a way to return to a typical trope of mine, let’s take a peek at the State of the Ryan via lyrics from this album, going by the sequential order of the track listings. Some quotes are contextual, some are not, all are relevant. It’s my blog, and I’ll quote if I want to. You’d quote too, if it happened to you.
Give me time and give me space
Give me real, don’t give me fake
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
“Politik”
It’s early February in New England. The groundhog has seen his shadow, meaning six more weeks of winter. Six weeks? Six freakin' more weeks? Someone, please, shoot me in the face.
By most accounts, it was the coldest January since 1888. Think about that. The last time it was this cold, Don Zimmer was 24 years old.
I do believe in a psychic winter, in that it’s convenient for me to do so, since I’m striving for applicability here. But there was something in the air last month, to be sure. The new year did not bring about renewal…it simply brought an often howling chill.
Silence, too. Much silence. Usually in the form of waiting by a phone for the only call in the world that matters to do. And never getting it. She wanted time and space. I wanted so much for what was hopefully happening to be real. Turns out, it was fake.
And so you strive for strength, and for a semblance of control. But as tight as you pull your jacket around your body, there’s a chill in your heart that can’t be bundled up, no matter how many layers.
Cold, desolate, unyielding. Yup, it was that kind of a month.
I was scared, I was scared
Tired and underprepared
But I wait for it
And if you go, if you go
And leave me down here on my own
Then I’ll wait for you
“In My Place”
I’ve never been accused of being patient. The waiting game’s never been my specialty. Leave my to my own devices, and I’ll generally pick them apart, piece by piece, and be left with a heaping pile pf parts I’ll never be able to re-assemble correctly.
That being said, for once, I felt like I could wait for something. Or somebody, in this case.
After all, if you feel like you’ve been waiting for 28 years, a few months couldn’t be that much worse, right? And you’ve not even waiting for Godot anymore, you’re just waiting for a “go”. A green light. And yes, you’re in the car, you’d rather get there sooner than later, but you will get there, so no rush, right?
And the longer you’re at the red light, the more you fiddle with the radio. The more calls you make on your cell. The more you think about what’s on the other side of the crossroads. And suddenly, the grass ain’t so much greener. Maybe a pale yellow. Hints of brown. Hardly a sunny meadow.
But she’s there, somewhere on the other side. You just have to be patient.
And then, she’s not there anymore.
And you’re stuck with the newest Matchbox 20 song as your only traveling companion. But you’re still waiting. Waiting is what you know. Even if they are no longer there. Even when they don’t want you to wait.
Still, you wait. And wonder. And turn up the volume until your ears bleed.
When you work out where to draw the line
Your guess is as good as mine
“God Put A Smile Upon Your Face”
So you’re there, and the noise and the wind and the cold and the crowds all conspire to a type of consistent white noise in your everyday life. You seem like a fully functional person, but only because many others are as self-involved as you does no one really and truly notice.
Sometimes, you pierce through the buzz and attempt to reach a coherent strain of thought. Look for something to hold onto in your brain as you piece through the scattered jigsaw puzzle of your life. Try to figure out some words that can express to someone what you’re going through, what you’re feeling, what happened.
And you wade through the muck and the mire and you find a big ol’ bag o’ nuttin’.
After all, there are no adequate words, no real replies, no truths to be found. You don’t know the answers not because of your own intellectual inferiority, but because there are no answers to be found.
That is, in its own way, worse. Hard to get closure that way. Hard to come to a conclusion when there’s no easily-reduced-to-a-stock-statement discovery after days/weeks/months of analysis.
Doesn’t mean we don’t keep looking, though, even after we figure out the utter futility of our search. Sometimes, it feels like it’s impossible to give up. Because once you’ve stopped, it’s really, truly, finally over.
I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
“The Scientist”
So you’re at the age-old point where logic and emotion take off their gloves and go all Aaron Burr/Alexander Hamilton on each other. Problem is, of course, that just as there are no answers, there’s no real way for these two to even fight. It’s “apples and oranges” to the nth degree. They are oil and water. Simon and Garfunkel. Take your choice of unmixable opposites.
Logic is, nominally, “cold”, meaning “devoid of emotion”. The opposite, in fact, colloquially speaking. To accuse someone of being “logical” is often a derisive tactic. You’re calling them insensitive and unfeeling. Likewise, people are often accused of reacting too emotionally, with nary a sense of decorum or reality in their responses.
One is not concurrently logical and emotional so much as one performs a delicate, always-about-to-collapse balancing act between the two. They don’t mix so much as co-exist. Each of us has our own ever-present mixture. Some people are 60/40, others 70/30. To complicate matters, some people can go in and re-arrange your chemical balance and shoot you to a 99% emotional composition, with that shred of logic barely hanging on for dear life.
And that’s what I think those last two lines are about, when the heart speaks louder than the mind, and the thumping in your chest is pounding louder than the machinations of your mind and you can’t think your way out, you can only feel your way out, but you’re blind and in the maze and the thumping isn’t helping your sense of direction and in the end, we all fall down.
Could be wrong about that, of course. But that’s what it can feel like, and while your instincts can often be wrong, the purity of the emotion never deceives. Leads you down a path you regret, perhaps. Take you into a back alley, beat you up, and take your lunch money, occasionally. But it never lies.
And to invest something so pure in something that turns out to be so false…well, it’s not fun. Not fun at all. Pull the puzzles apart, see the design, and see it walk away. Not for the faint of a now-bleeding heart.
Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease
“Clocks”
It’s one of the great conundrums of our time, up there with the whole nature/nurture debate, the Coke/Pepsi debate, and the Paris/Nicole Ritchie debate.
So do I attract these types of girls, or are these types drawn to me?
I hesitate to classify these women, since a lot of them read the site, and I don’t wanna hurt any feelings, and who am I kidding, they are all nucking futs.
There. Said. Whew. I feel better. Cleansed. Like I had an enema administered by Edward Scissorhands.
The worst part about the most recent dating debacle is not that it didn’t work out, although on a suckage meter, that’s awful high. Lower than “impaled upon something sharp at a high velocity”, but definitely above “slipped roofies again by that cute bartender at Friday’s, that saucy minx”. No, worse than that is the fact I once again don’t trust my instincts.
I’m sorta like Drew Barrymore. No, really, work with me here. Her character in “Charlie’s Angels” is a barometer for dangerous men. In real life, I seem to be the same Ground Zero For Those Looking to Take a Guy and Mentally Beat Him Like a Red-Headed Step Child. Oh sure, for a bit they are Shaking It Like a Polaroid Picture. And after that, they are Making Me Consider The Moral Grounds Of Decisions I Made In A Past Life. Soon, we move onto them Creating Scenarios and Plots So Complex I Couldn’t Possibly Have Come Up, Never Mind Execute, Them. And then, the real fun begins.
Yes, I’m being all hyperbolic, but even when I give the straight skinny to friends, blow by blow, of some of these women over the past year, and you’d swear by their slack-jawed, glazed over expression that I was talking about my time as a POW in ‘Nam. Sure, my view isn’t 100% untainted, in that every retelling of history is in and of itself a work of fiction to some extent, but unintentional rewriting aside, it’s enough to make one pause, enough to make one ponder, enough to make C+C Music Factory go “hmmmm”.
In the end, I’m responsible for some part of this. After the past year, you’d think I’d have some tiny bit of insight, but instead, I’m here, writing about my lack of insight what again. What a rip-off, I know. If y’all paid for this, I’d give you your money back. Luckily, you don’t, so I can chalk all of this up to a “recurring motif”, which is pretty damn slick of me, I must say.
I am nothing in the dark
And the clouds burst to show daylight
“Daylight”
And yea, you have to make jokes about all of this, because if you don’t, you end up like some tragic victim on the 6 o’clock news who everybody liked, and how did it come to this, and they show a picture of you in the 5th grade with those silly bangs that made you look like the dorky Beatle. And trust me, that isn’t good.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again. At the end of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”’s sixth season, Giles, her Watcher, comes back after a prolonged absence. Buffy confesses all that has gone wrong in the year since his departure, and Giles’ response, after her lengthy monologue, is to simply burst into laughter.
Thank God I can write about this stuff, some of it, at least. I mean, if I bottled it all up, it’d form one nasty ball of bile in my belly, and really, my digestive system is bizarre enough on its own without any added elements. My friend Julie is right---I do think too much, but for every instance where my mind wraps itself into a knot too complicated to unravel, it also points to some truths I wouldn’t have come up with in a “drink ‘til the pain goes way” approach.
I’ve always thought a lot, OK, too much. But when you go to private school and then an Ivy League school, you don’t notice this fact, because everyone around you is as full of crap as you are. So you just assume, by a socially mandated complicity, that everyone deals with the world in the overwrought, overcomplicated, not-really-relating-to-reality way as you do.
If the last year has taught me much of anything, it’s that I’m straight, but Kyan’s pretty hot. Wait, that’s not what I meant. Not at all.
What the last year has shown is not the lack of value in thinking, but rather the virtue of, at times, simply letting go of such thoughts. I had drinks with Obi-Wan tonite, and I think she was pleasantly surprised at my lack of sobbing. I mean, she coulda done without my consistent groping, but that’s another article altogether.
Letting go of thought, giving in to action. Not something I’m good at. The last time I’d felt this strongly about someone, I was 21. Seven long years ago. Back then, when the bottom fell out, I could skip class, drink beer, watch “Simpsons” reruns, and basically drop out without a whole lot of consequence to my actions. Now, well, there’s work. And bills to pay. And family to see on the weekends. And books to deliver. And maybe this more mature response isn’t based so much more in maturity (although that certainly plays a part) as the sheer fact of my very living has forced me to put one foot in front of the other. As such, I have had less time to dwell, and thusly, have been in much less of a sad funk and in more of a P-Funk.
I mean, there’s nothing to be done to change what happened. Nothing that I could have said then, nothing that I could say now. Maybe sunlight’s on its way soon. I’d like to think so. But mostly, I’d like not to think. I’d like to do.
Whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. Not sure what that is yet. Mostly likely won’t know next week or next month.
Soon enough, though.
That’s a nice thought to have.
***
Part Two can be found here.
Posted by Ryan McGee at February 04, 2004 08:46 AM